jose dávila natural forms,

Nara Roesler Rio de Janeiro is pleased to present Natural Forms, the second solo exhibition in Brazil by José Dávila (1974, Guadalajara, Mexico), and his first in Rio de Janeiro. The presentation follows Um pirata, um poeta, um peão e um rei [A pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king], held at Nara Roesler São Paulo in 2023, and brings together nine works: eight new sculptures and the painting The fact of constantly returning to the same point or situation (2025).

Conceived especially for the exhibition, the sculptures respond directly to the gallery’s architecture. “In my studio, I built something like a full-scale model of the gallery and began working directly within it,” Dávila explains. Their dimensions and proportions were determined in relation to that space.

For more than two decades, Dávila has investigated fundamental properties of sculpture, including weight, density, volume, mass, and balance. In Natural Forms, this research unfolds through what he calls “the simple act of positioning”: placing objects in dialogue and observing what their encounter produces. Stone, travertine marble, concrete, metal, glass, wood, and bronze are supported, balanced, or brought into proximity, with as little intervention as possible in their existing forms.

For Dávila, natural forms—such as stones found in the landscape—already possess enough sculptural content to be appreciated on their own. “They are sculptures before the sculpture,” he says. He approaches glass, metal, and concrete with the same attentiveness. Rather than set the natural world against the industrialized one, Dávila seeks to recognize the primary forms already present in each material and, through minimal gestures and subtle colors, find their poetry.

The exhibition marks Dávila’s first presentation in Rio de Janeiro. “It is a city of immense cultural importance. Exhibiting in Brazil is always important to me because Brazilian art, architecture, and landscape design have profoundly influenced me; they are inherently present in my work,” he says.

This connection to Rio is further articulated through Neoconcretism. Recalling the Neoconcrete Manifesto, written by poet and art critic Ferreira Gullar and signed by artists including Amílcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape, Dávila points to the movement’s break with São Paulo Concretism and its shift away from a strictly rational approach to geometry toward a more intuitive, organic, and sensitive experience. “I am trying to ask myself the same questions asked by the artists who signed the Neoconcrete Manifesto: how can an organic, subtle, gentle intuition be brought into geometric form—and, in this case, through industrial materials?”.

This convergence of geometry, intuition, and materiality appears in the three works titled Homage to the Square (2026). The title directly invokes the eponymous series begun in 1950 by artist and educator Josef Albers, whose inquiry into color and perception conceptually resonates with Neoconcretism. Made of metal, glass, and wood, Dávila’s new works revisit his earlier engagement with Albers, using a new technique he developed to examine more closely how light falls and colors interact.

The painting The fact of constantly returning to the same point or situation extends this inquiry into the relationship among form, color, and perception. In this series, Dávila constructs circles of varying colors and consistencies, often leaving them incomplete or interrupting them at the edges of the canvas, so that the composition cannot be grasped as a whole.

The poetic dimension of the exhibition also extends to the titles of the works. Man made mountain (2026), a sculpture composed of concrete, metal, and stone, draws on Dávila’s reading of “Thinking Like a Mountain,” an essay by American ecologist and writer Aldo Leopold published in A Sand County Almanac in 1949. In the essay, Leopold recalls killing a she-wolf and later coming to understand that the mountain knew something he did not. Dávila translates this insight into sculpture: “To accept that form possesses a kind of reason that precedes us; that one arrives late, that one does not know.”

Taken together, the works extend the investigation Dávila presented in The Simple Act of Positioning in New York, but at a different intensity. Whereas the New York works operated in a more frontal register, for Rio he sought the opposite: “It is the same investigation, turning down the volume, so to speak, to see what can still be heard.”

This quieter register gives rise to what Dávila calls the exhibition’s “silent frequency.” “It is about achieving an impact through a whisper, not a shout,” he says. “The question I believe runs through the exhibition is whether, with the slightest gesture, it’s possible to generate this poetic content; whether it’s possible to sustain a work at the lowest possible register without dissolving it.” Subtle desire (2026), a sculpture in travertine marble, concrete, and metal, encapsulates this pursuit in its title.